Anger as cable car fire village awaits verdict

Witnesses to a cable car inferno that killed 155 people at a resort high in the Austrian Alps awaited the end of an 18-month-long trial with a mixture of anger and resignation today.

A court in Salzburg will tomorrow hand down verdicts on 16 cable car operators, technicians and government officials who prosecutors say were responsible through neglect. If convicted, they face up to five years in prison.

“Someone has to be found responsible for such a terrible event,” said Tarek Fehia, 28, who runs a ski shop in the resort of Kaprun. ”If somebody didn’t do their job properly or take the proper precautions, then they should be made to pay for it.”

“It’s the only way people can draw a line under what happened and forget that terrible day,” he said.

Others in Kaprun, 60 miles south of Salzburg, wept when asked about the trial.

“Whatever the verdict, it’s not going to bring those 155 people back to life,” said the owner of a small guest house near the starting station of the cable car. “I’m still very angry and upset about what happened, but life has to go on whether they find someone guilty or not.”

Fire swept through the crowded cable car on November 11, 2000, as it carried 161 skiers, snowboarders and a driver through a tunnel up the Kitzsteinhorn glacier near Kaprun.

Among the dead was British ski instructor Kevin Challis, from Dorset. He had given up his spot to an old man on the previous cable car, which his eight-year-old daughter Siobhan was on.

She waited for her father at the top of the Kitzsteinhorn glacier when smoke began billowing from the tunnel mouth.

Investigators say the blaze most likely started when a production-related defect in a space heater caused a heating element to come loose, causing hydraulic brake oil in nearby pipes to overheat, drip onto the plastic-coated floor and set it alight.

The driver initially was unable to open the doors. When he did, many of those escaping upward through the tunnel were killed by toxic fumes from the blazing car.

Authorities allege that the heater never should have been installed and that it was too close to the hydraulic pipes.

It holds responsible officials from the company which ran the cable car, manufacturers and installers of the heater, and government officials who carried out safety inspections for allowing the inferno to happen by neglecting to check into what a simple fault could do.

Prosecutor Eva Danninger-Soriat told the court in closing arguments last month that the dangers involved in installing the heater were known to the accused.

Lawyers representing the operating company say all safety regulations in force at the time of the blaze were enforced. They contend the company cannot be held responsible for safety defects that only became apparent after the investigation into the blaze.

All 16 suspects have pleaded innocent.

Most victims were from Austria and Germany.

Separate civil trials are under way in New York and in Germany, where lawyers for American and German victims are seeking billions of pounds in compensation.

The operating company has refused to deal with compensation claims until a verdict is reached in the criminal case.

In Kaprun, the entrance to the tunnel remains firmly closed and the route of the now-closed funicular railway has been carefully painted over on large outdoor maps showing local ski routes.

Fresh flowers lay on a shrine of wooden crosses bearing the names of victims of the blaze close to the cable car station’s lowest point.